STMicroelectronics, which claims to be the world's number one supplier of set-top box (STB) and MPEG decoder chips, has achieved a milestone.

According to a medianet press release, the company's cumulative shipments of MPEG-2 devices to STB manufacturers have now exceeded 100 million units since the first units were produced in 1995, making it the first chip supplier to achieve this milestone figure.

The release adds that this success underlines ST's continuous leadership in enabling the creation and development of the STB market. By crossing the 100 million units mark, the company claim's set new records for market ramp-up in the consumer industry; passing the 10 and 100 million unit marks faster than any previous consumer phenomena such as VCRs, PCs and audio CDs.

"This milestone figure underlines ST's continual leadership in the STB market," says ST Microelectronics India country director Pradeep Kumar. He adds: "Our pioneering products with leading edge technology will help Indian manufacturers smoothly transition into this new phase of manufacturing Digital set-top boxes at affordable costs."

ST claims to have pioneered the MPEG-2 chips used in STBs when it introduced the world's first Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) processor chip in 1988 and the world's first motion estimation processor chip in 1990.

Motion estimation and DCT are key parts of the MPEG technology essential to STB, DVD and similar applications that require multimedia content to be compressed prior to distribution and subsequently decompressed.

This early leadership allowed ST to establish and maintain its track record of being the first chip supplier to pass every significant technology and market milestone in the STB and MPEG arenas - including the first MPEG-2 video decoder; the first MPEG-2 audio/video decoder; the first integrated MPEG Transport Stream Demultiplexer Processor; the first complete chipset for digital satellite STBs; and the first supplier to ship 10 million, 50 million and 100 million MPEG-2 video decoders.

The release adds that ST's continuing leadership is exemplified by its recently introduced STi5516, the latest member of its OMEGA family, which is the de facto industry standard for MPEG decoding. Suitable for use in satellite, cable and terrestrial TV applications, the new System-on-Chip (SoC) device sets unprecedented standards in terms of performance and integration level while retaining full compatibility with earlier solutions, thereby ensuring fast, safe and cost-effective product migration.

According to the release, ST's OMEGA (STi55xx) family provides the most advanced solutions for all applications that involve MPEG-2 multimedia compression technology, allowing the company to leverage its continuous leadership in the STB market into other fast-growing sectors such as DVD (Digital Versatile Disk) players.

ST's decoder chips have become an integral part of set-top box deployment of global cable operators for several years now.

STMicroelectronics' pioneering development of MPEG-2 chips used in the vast majority of DIRECTV systems have also played a leading role in the digital satellite television revolution that began more than eight years ago in the west.

STIndia has been operating since 1983, and is in excellent position to service customers and Indian manufacturers to locally customize its solutions to fit into the Indian environment.